In response to a provocation from a politician with a loose hold on historical facts, yesterday I posted (on What Makes Us Human) a deconstruction of his claim that “marriage” had been a relationship between one man and one woman since “the beginning of human history”.

It was actually difficult; I knew it would be, because every time I read that generic claim (and in variants it comes up a lot) I try to think about how to even begin to address it. This time, the way I found through was to stick to the specifics of this particular politician’s claim. Since this particular version of the general claim equated human history and “civilization”, I felt that it was likely that “history” here did not mean what I would mean– the entire record of our species– but what a naive freshman means until they learn better– written documents. So I could start with what “marriage” had been since the earliest written records we have.

Responding also required, of course, my defining “marriage” but there again, I was able to rely on the implicit definition behind the politician’s words: a sanctioned legal and/or religious institution which he, offensively, claimed was a “social benefit” only due to the potential it provided for childbirth.

So I am happy with the post, in general. You cannot please everyone, and getting too scholastic would impede making the point that even within the narrow confines of the documentary record for a legally or religiously sanctioned relationship for the purpose of reproduction, the former senator has his facts wrong. I think the post worked for its purpose.

But it has gotten me into a side exchange with a critic who has accused me of giving ammunition to opponents of gay marriage in the US today by mentioning that polygamy was a valid form of marriage in “human history” aka the documentary record in Mesopotamia and the Levant, and the ethnographic record pretty much all over the place.

Reflecting on the sidebar conversation, I realize that one of the problems with the original post– one I decided to sidestep on purpose– is that it doesn’t tackle head-on the question that has, up till now, made it impossible for me to write anything like this: what is “marriage”?

As an anthropologist trained in the rich line of social theory that began with Emile Durkheim and the parallel line leading from Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, I know that where once we took comfort in the cross-cultural validity of categories like “marriage”, already by the 1950s these terms were under question. Compare Marcel Mauss in his Manual of Ethnography (originally published in 1947, based on a text compiled from lecture notes) to Rodney Needham in Remarks and Inventions (1974), an extension of arguments from his classic Rethinking Kinship and Marriage (1971):

Mauss: Marriage is the legal bond uniting two persons with a view to founding a family, de facto or de jure– in principle a family in the legal sense, but there are all possible degrees between marriage proper and a factual situation which ends up as a legal one so far as concerns the children. It is the sanction for a certain sexual morality.

Needham: Strictly speaking, such theory [of kinship and marriage] does not exist: there are forms of social life from which it is deduced. What typically happens is that social forms are more or less adventitiously correlated in particular societies, and the correlations are then generalized; but the more we test the resultant conclusions the more we find they are vitiated by contrary instances or by category mistakes.

A true theory would call in the first place for a vocabulary of analytical concepts that were appropriate to the phenomena under consideration but would not be merely derived from them. For this purpose the terms of common English are worse than unserviceable.

“Worse than unserviceable”.  What Needham is urging is that we not make the mistake of lumping together practices shaped by very different circumstances under a modern covering term that by definition is rooted in a contemporary experience. Talking about “marriage” means we will inevitably end up talking about the regulation of “sexual morality”, and the legalization of children, not because there is universally a single institution that does those two things, but because that is what marriage does or did in France and Great Britain (and the US) in the 20th century.

Every anthropologist, archaeologist, and historian in the world knows this. But what’s the alternative? when a bigoted senator wants to claim that “marriage” has always been just the way he wishes it were today, do we say “well, you know, first we have to define marriage, and you know, there isn’t always something we can identify that way…” Walk away from any chance to intervene in public policy debates? Give way on the argument that what we do is esoteric and divorced from contemporary life?

I think not.

Instead, what we do and must continue doing is to break down the terms, denaturalize, historicize, and yes, relativize. So I give you not marriage but something else as a challenge: under what circumstances do the different strands taken for granted today when journalists write about “marriage” emerge?

What I tried to do over at What Makes Us Human is situate the institution of marriage understood by an ignorant politician as timeless within its own specific history. Break it down: the claim being made is that one male and one female are sanctioned to engage in sex by a broader group because the children they will produce are a social benefit. “Marriage” here is thus a covering term for heterosexuality; monogamy; social sanction; and procreation. Where that got me in the post was to pronatalist policies, because that is what is being espoused: people deserve recognition in their sexual relationships only because these produce children. As I noted there, pronatalist policies are strongly associated with states.

But I also pointed out that the history of social approval of particular heterosexual liaisons, because they will produce offspring, that lies behind the senator’s fantasy that “it was ever thus” is historically rooted in inter-familial contracts directed at the persistence of family property– estates, names, and histories. There is a rich historical and anthropological literature on family strategies, even just for European societies, that shows that the interests of family persistence may not always lie in producing children; having an heir is critical, but having too many potential heirs can be problematic. David Kertzer and Caroline Brettel, in a classic review “Italian and Iberian Family History” (1987), discuss practices that limited the number of heirs, including child abandonment; permanent celibacy; regulation of remarriage; and illegitimacy, childbirth resulting from sexual relations not sanctioned legally. When we note that historically, polygamous marriages were legal in Mesopotamian societies but remained rare due to the economics involved, we are talking not about regulation of sexuality, but of property rights.

In the contemporary world, although property rights transmission is still sometimes relevant, debates about rights to marriage more often mobilize what Mauss added in his final, almost throw-away sentence: marriage “is the sanction for a certain sexual morality“. Here we have at the very least three different perspectives to examine. First, there is that matter of “sanctioning”: sexual relations need not be formally sanctioned to take place. Second, we have what “morality” implies: approval or disapproval of sexual partner choice. This includes, but is of course not limited to, prescriptions about expected enlistments of sexual anatomies that will be recognized jurally or socially. Finally, number of participants is also a source of social and legal interest in those situations where institutions we can translate as marriages exist. The peculiar position I find myself in, having a queer activist upset because I mention polygamy and same sex marriage in the same post, demonstrates that the question of number and the question of anatomies and desires need not be aligned.

As an anthropologist, I will continue to insist that we cannot rule on either of these last dimensions of variability in sexual relations, sanctioned or not, as more or less natural. In my blog post, I noted recent research suggesting on comparative linguistic grounds that monogamy emerged as a normative form of sexual relationship relatively recently (between 10,000 and 5,000 BCE) in those social groups speaking languages ancestral to Indo-European. Whether we accept this specific analysis or not, the point is that human sexual relations are unlikely to have been static, and anyone trying to argue for modern social practices by locating them in a timeless past is simply abusing the facts.

What I will support, and do argue in my professional writing, is that there are plenty of historical examples of socially recognized and celebrated unions between people whose sexual anatomies were similar, not different. If anyone reading this post is unfamiliar with this fact, I can recommend “A History of Same-Sex Marriage” by William Eskridge, published in 1993 in the Virginia Law Review. He opens with the figures of We’wha, the Zuni lhamana (a third gender status person); Ifeyinwa Olinke, an Igbo woman, a “female husband” with nine wives and a husband she overshadowed with her own wealth described by anthropologist Ifi Amediune; and the fourth century Christian Roman soldiers Sergius and Bacchus, who died for their religion, and who historian John Boswell controversially argued exemplify a tradition of Christian sanctioned same-sex marriage. While from an anthropological point of view this merges very different forms of social position and sexual subjectivity, the point in each case is that these were relations recognized as normal within their respective societies.

Institutions like “marriage” have not always and everywhere been limited to one man and one woman. But to say this requires us to analyze what we mean by “marriage”. As Eskridge writes

First, marriage is not a naturally generated institution with certain essential elements. instead, it is a construction that is linked with other cultural and social institutions, so that the old-fashioned boundaries between the public and private life melt away. Second, the social construction of institutions like marriage is not and cannot be neutral, for it involves the playing out of a society’s power relationships….Third, the social construction of marriage is dynamic. Linked as it is to other institutions and attitudes, marriage will change as they change. (emphasis added)

This is to me the most important point: no matter how one wants to slice history, social institutions regulating associations among persons, to sanction sex, to legitimate children, to determine the passage of property, or for any other reason we might imagine, are not timeless frameworks. If I have to reduce the scope of my discussion to address a more popular audience, I will do it to get this one simple fact across: things haven’t always been the way they are now, and there is nothing to dictate that humans cannot change the way we do things.

We are wary of the easy projection of modern sexual identification onto objects made in very different contexts in the past.  On the other hand, while sexualization is a form of exoticization, so, of course, is de-sexualization.

What got me started thinking about the balancing act required when confronted with objects evidencing sexual practices in the past was a story from the Spanish news source EFE. A version published January 7 on the Colombian news website Vanguardia features an image of a Chinese porcelain bowl, under a headline that can be translated “Look at the unusual art collection of a convent of Portuguese nuns”.

What’s unusual about this? A subtitle under a row of thumbnail illustrations clarifies:

The erotic motifs of an old and valuable Chinese vase found among the ruins of a Portuguese convent are unique in the art known from the 17th century.

Vanguardia helpfully provides illuminating closeups of details from the illustrated bowl, showing explicit moments in heterosexual encounters. The article expresses in the purplest of prose a claim that the dish represented “explicit pornographic images, more than erotic, inspired by the Kamasutra”.

Imagining the danger posed to the owner especially if this were property of a member of the Santana convent community, Vanguardia continues:

It is a daring work even for the 21st century and totally sinful for the epoch in which it arrived to the convent, when to play with the strict morality of those times could bring excommunication, exile and even prison or death for less scandalous conduct.

Here we see the tension between exoticization and desexualization on full display. It is a “daring” work for modernity, from which it is clearly understood to be disconnected. Thus, there is a shock that people in the past might have enjoyed some form of sexual culture.

Mexico’s El Universal printed a longer version of the same story. The original seems to have appeared back in August 2011. The only place I have found coverage in English is the Go Lisbon Blog. Where the news articles present the object as an unsolved puzzle Go Lisbon has no problem offering explanations:

How would such a thing end up in a convent, of all places? Well, for one thing, Lisbon’s convents weren’t always the most sacred places on Earth. Their male and female residents were actually known to live with bigger freedoms than those on the “outside world.” Inquisition documents show that love affairs and homosexuality were actually frequent. Many nuns were even lovers of the Portuguese kings. One of them even had to build a palace just for his bastard children born of those relationships (that palace is now the Spanish Embassy). These nuns were also quite rich, receiving precious gifts which may explain the origin of this well-kept treasure.

Much heat here, but little light.

To actually begin to understand this object, we might want to separate the circumstances of production of this bowl, with its sexual scenes, and of its consumption by an eighteenth-century Portuguese owner.

The Lady Lever Art Gallery, part of the Liverpool Museums, illustrates a Qing dynasty beaker, like the Lisbon bowl with blue under-glaze painted erotic designs. The caption reads:

Erotic scenes are rare in Chinese art, and mainly known from ‘pillow books’, containing series of illustrations of sexual positions, said to have been used as manuals for the young and newly-wed. On porcelain openly erotic scenes are even rarer.

So, the first step is to trace a broader history of Chinese sexual images.

The emergence of erotic art in China is identified as a phenomenon of the late Ming (1368-1644 AD) and Qing (1644-1911 AD) dynasties. Late Ming society, according to Monica Merlin, was characterized by general commercialization, rising emphasis on consumption, and development of popular culture, including a flourishing printing industry. Craig Clunas pinpoints the period between 1560 and 1640 as “some sort of high point” in the production of explicitly sexual woodblock prints, as well as for pornographic fiction. He notes that novels describe albums of erotic woodblock prints brought by men to women to stimulate desire. This is the apparent source of the Liverpool Museum’s description, which actually collapses Japanese and Chinese practices and takes fiction as a model for real practice. Clunas suggests instead that we think of the audience for these products of Late Ming society as the “empowered solitary male who would have had access both within the home and commercially to male and female partners”. Such men could take advantage of not only the products of the flourishing printing industry, but also of  “pleasure quarters” in cities like late Ming Nanjing, where Merlin describes courtesans who “achieved great esteem for their writing and painting skills as they embodied values of culture, chivalry, and nostalgia”.

It is in contexts like this that rarer media with erotic images similar to woodblock prints would likely have developed. Writing in 1908, Edward Dillon attributed the cultivation of erotic porcelain production to the Ming dynasty emperor Longqing, ruling from 1567-1572 AD.

The blue underglaze porcelain that was the medium for such images entered European circulation through the efforts of traders from Portugal, who imported it in small quantities. Naturalistic designs became prominent in the 16th and early 17th centuries. By 1602, Chinese potteries were already producing blue underglaze pottery for European exporters. After the Dutch East India company sold a large volume of material in 1603 from cargo seized from the Portuguese, demand increased.

The small bowl that excited the prurient interest of EFE falls squarely into this line of production. Objects like these were desired by European consumers taking part in the first wave of the fashion for chinoiserie. David Porter, in a study of the specific reception of such goods in Great Britain, argues that eighteenth-century Europe experienced a shock of “transformative awareness” with knowledge of the long history of Chinese civilization that gave consuming objects of Chinese style a particular power, combining “luxurious novelty” with the “cultural legitimacy” of antiquity.

While we cannot know who the Portuguese owner of the bowl recovered in Lisbon was, its presence there reflected the early and continuing role of Portugal in trade with China. The Portuguese established the first European trade relations with China, with Macao as their trading port from the 1550s on, originally promoting trade of Chinese goods to Japan.

According to a summary of earlier excavations, the Convent of Santana in Lisbon, where the bowl was found, was established in the 16th century, partly destroyed by a major earthquake in 1755, and not reconstructed until after 1778. In the 19th century it became a Royal Institute of Bacteriology and today is the location of the medical faculty of the Universidade Nova. According to another newspaper article in July 2011, the excavations (which lasted from 2002-2011) produced evidence of wealthy residents, perhaps not members of religious orders. This source cites a population of 300 persons in 1702, including 130 members of religious orders.

We can, then, place the acquisition of this bowl as a product of a commercial network operating among the wealthy of Lisbon. What would the imagery on the bowl have meant for a member of the Portuguese nobility around 1700? First and foremost, this would have been an item of luxury, product of a distant civilization understood to have its own long and quite distinct history. Rather than automatically assume it was seen as erotic, or served pornographic ends, we need to take into account this distance between the source culture and Lisbon society. As a kind of window on the values of that other civilization, it might more easily have served to emphasize the character of China, as exotic other, than for the cultivation of desire in its owner, secular or religious, male or female.

Clunas concludes that “it would be anachronistic to introduce the nineteenth-century concept of ‘pornography’” into a study of such objects, but “it would be equally wrong to ‘relativize the concept out of existence’”. This balancing act becomes doubly difficult when it involves the cross-cultural transfer of an object made for one context and deployed in another. Projecting modern sensibilities about sexuality onto such an object simply multiplies the difficulties a third time, as we mobilize ideologies about sex and privacy, separation of sex from everyday life, and absolute division of life celibate orders from the business of everyday life. None of that, though, is safe baggage to bring to understanding something as complicated as this single bowl.

Among those articles that the students simply seemed not to get: Elizabeth Brumfiel’s amazing, transformative Distinguished Lecture for the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association: “Breaking and entering the ecosystem: Gender, class, and faction steal the show”. (If you have access to JSTOR, here’s a stable URL link.)

Brumfiel gave her lecture in 1991. She was the third Distinguished Lecturer of the AAA, the first woman. Postprocessual archaeology was still a British import viewed with intense suspicion in the US. Reading the Past was first published that year. So was Meg Conkey and Joan Gero’s Engendering Archaeology.

Brumfiel, of course, had been a participant in the 1988 Wedge Conference that led to Engendering Archaeology. Her contribution to the 1991 volume, “Weaving and Cooking: Women’s production in Aztec Mexico”, is one of the articles my students will read and discuss this spring in Archaeology of Sex and Gender. It wasn’t my first contact with her exciting work on Aztec society and gender: in 1990, I was part of a AAA session in which Liz delivered her classic paper, “Figurines, Ideological Domination and the Aztec State”.

For me, these papers were reinforcement that what I was trying to do was on the right track: the combination of looking at everyday practices at the household level and visual media that in some situations might have promoted gender ideologies.

But it is the American Anthropologist publication of her Distinguished Lecture that I think archaeology grad students today need to read to really understand both the productive nature of critiques of processual archaeology around 1990, and the fact that these critiques did not form, and do not form today, a single unified school of thought.

Liz’s work was securely grounded in Marxist approaches to political economy. At the 1994 AAA meeting in Atlanta, as discussant of my paper “High Culture, Mesoamerican Civilization, and the Classic Maya Tradition”, she gave me an encouraging set of comments– but she also suggested that what I was doing “is really just political economy”. It took me a while to realize that was also meant as a positive comment. What Liz did herself, and wanted to be sure others did, was to rigorously think through the wider grounded context, and she could be counted on to be critical if the work I did seemed to be getting too abstract and symbolic.

Liz combined her rigorous materialism with strong feminist anthropological commitments. Her Distinguished Lecture cited the work of anthropologists Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider on cloth, work that pursued new analyses of kin-mediated social relations and the role of textiles in negotiating them. Christine Ward Gailey’s remarkable materialist work on transformation from kinship-based to state societies supported the argument. She also brought Irene Silverblatt’s analyses of the evolution of states and women’s roles in them into the discussion. Henrietta Moore’s now-classic Space, Text and Gender made an appearance. The work of Rayna Rapp also provided feminist theoretical grounding for Liz’s paper.

In it, she makes a strong, compelling argument for taking the actions of men and women seriously, replacing what she suggested were models overly-dependent on systems with models that would, as she said in her conclusion,

enable us to create a more humane archeology, an archeology that will acknowledge the creativity and discretion that women and men, subjects and rulers have exercised in the past to fashion their livelihoods and promote their well-being.

Today, a whole generation of students can take this goal for granted. They don’t have to fight to have this kind of thinking accepted as viable and important.

I was one of the beneficiaries of her advocacy, not just a recipient of the encouragement provided by her own writing. When the manuscript for my book, Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica, was under review by the University of Texas, Liz was one of the readers. She gave me a ton of great specific comments, but the most important thing she did was to start her review with an endorsement: “This is a big, important book”, she wrote. That mattered, not just to the editorial board that approved the book, but to me: to have a scholar of Liz’s rigor appreciate what I was doing– including the parts where I diverged from the feminist theories she used, and turned to the more radical work of Judith Butler– mattered.

And I know I am not alone. Liz Brumfiel will always be remembered.

Ever wonder why January 1 is observed as New Year’s Day in the Gregorian calendar? I went on a journey to find a rationale for this unusual choice; biased by years of studying ancient Mesoamerica, I found it odd that with the winter solstice so close, the year began at an apparently arbitrary date. So I traced this traditional date back to the Roman calendar where it marked the first day of a month named in honor of Janus– god of beginnings of all kinds:

harvest time, planting, marriage, birth, and other types of beginnings, especially the beginnings of important events in a person’s life.

Janus has two faces, one looking back, one forward. Looking forward, I will be posting much more regularly this spring, because after a two year hiatus (while I taught History of Anthropological Thought in 2010 and took a sabbatical in 2011) I am again teaching my interdisciplinary course in Berkeley’s Letters and Sciences Discovery Courses program, Archaeology of Sex and Gender.

So, starting in just a couple of weeks, I will be meeting 100 undergrads twice a week for an exploration of the core questions that inspired this blog (and the book it is named after), how we can understand the experience of being a person with a sexualized body indirectly, through the things that people used and made in the past (including texts). Since 2009, I redesigned the course entirely, in part so it would qualify as a way for students to satisfy Berkeley’s American Cultures requirement. Mainly, what the American Cultures program allowed me to do was integrate a lot of great work that has been published in recent years on the archaeology of the Chinese-American experience and the African-American experience, so I will be hoping to give special emphasis in upcoming posts to that work.

But Janus has two faces, and the second one looks back at the previous year. And popular culture in the US has in practice codified this in the form of lists, usually lists of ten items.

Like starting the year on January 1, which has no astronomical or seasonal significance, listing 10 items is entirely conventional, a product of use of the decimal system, a legacy of the Greco-Roman dominance of Europe.

(Ancient Chinese, Hindu, and Arabic mathematics were also based on the decimal system, of course; while the ancient Babylonians gave us a legacy of measurement of angles using the sexagesimal system based on sixty instead of ten. But as a specialist in Mesoamerica, famous for the use of vigesimal systems, I am delighted to discover that my Celtic ancestors also employed base-20 math. To quote Jan Gullberg’s Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers, “The vigesimal numeration system was the usual mode of counting in many ancient cultures because humans have ten fingers and ten toes on which to count.” Got to love that speculative history: take off your shoes, everyone: time to calculate the price of wheat.)

I decided not to do a ten best posts of 2011 list. Instead, here are five highlights of 2011; assume I got tired after counting on one hand:

1. Without doubt, one story got the most attention: the Gay Caveman. Needless to say, it is important for anthropologists to combat inaccurate and misleading journalism, but sometimes I felt like that was shooting fish in barrels.
2. So, I am pleased to say that an experimental post I did about a session on bioarchaeology at the 2011 Society for American Archaeology meetings was also popular with visitors. I posted an edited version of my discussant comments– a format that rarely sees print, and seems to me to be a great way to get news out beyond the few thousand members of the SAA who get to see the program. Watch for more of this kind of blogging in 2012, as I am slated as discussant for an exciting session at the 2012 SAA meetings in Memphis on household archaeology.
3. Weirdly, also in my top five visited blog posts was one I did about a report of an Etruscan dig finding an image depicting childbirth. Partly, I think this post got attention because it dealt with the Classical world– I can say with some confidence that Classical archaeology is way ahead of the rest of us in blogging. But I also wonder if part of the reason this post got readership is that it chronicles an event that we know was ubiquitous but is often absent in accounts of the past. So for 2012, my resolution is to remember that one of my missions is to cover aspects of life that are not being talked up in the mainstream media.
4. For another one of my top five blog posts by visitation I forgot a cardinal rule (I plead temporary insanity) because I was so charmed by something new to me: the incredible BBC series “A History of the World in 100 Objects”. The episode I wrote about started with the sentence “We end with pepper, and we’re going to begin with …” (add a four letter word starting with p and ending with n that denotes materials intended for the arousal of physical affective behaviors). Yes, I had the bad sense to put perhaps the most searched keyword into a post. And then I compounded that by adding a title that makes me wince today. I think I was still operating on the assumption that this blog was mostly going to remain invisible. I still love the BBC series, and like the post; but I feel awfully sorry for those people who search for Roman p…n (on the other hand, why search those terms??) and get my modest little commentary on ancient art.
5. But visitor numbers shouldn’t be the only measure of what counted. Keeping journalists honest is one good goal, as is publicizing good contemporary archaeological and bioarchaeological and bioanthropological work. But dearest to my heart are those few occasions when what I am writing matters because it counters still-entrenched tendencies within our discipline that those of us who identify with the project of archaeology of sex and gender are trying to change. The “gay caveman” had some of that potential, except that there, the erroneous material was largely introduced by journalists. What I feel there needs to be more of is questioning our own logic within the discipline. In other words: Dead babies are (still) still bad evidence for a Roman brothel. This post received a lot of comments as well as a lot of visitors (second only to the gay caveman in comments, and just squeaking past the witch’s cottage– where I think I learned that writing about cats is inherently attractive). In fact, if we add the comments and audience for the original post from 2010 on the claim that infant remains proved this British site was a Roman brothel, this story is clearly second only to the gay caveman in reader response.

So, there’s my non-decimal list looking backward and forward at once. In 2012, I resolve to continue keeping the press honest; to act when anthropological ideas are being abused or misunderstood, no matter who is behind the abuse or misuse; to connect readers with the life experiences of people in the past whenever possible; and to share with the broader world those discussions that normally take place behind closed doors, in the relative exclusivity of the classroom and the conference room.

I hope you will stay with me for 2012. Thanks for being there in 2011…

She was a very old woman, about the age of four-score years, and had been a witch for fifty years. She dwelt in the Forest of Pendle, a vast place, fit for her profession: What she committed in her time, no man knows. She was a general agent for the Devil in all these parts: no man escaped her, or her furies, that ever gave them any occasion of offence, or denied them anything they stood need of: And certain it is, no man near them, was secure or free from danger.

Description of the suspected witch known as Demdike, from The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster, 1613, by Thomas Potts

One of my favorite academic articles was published in 1998 under the title “Where are the witches of prehistory?”. The abstract for the paper begins “Why are certain classes of ritually destroyed objects (persons, artifacts, or architecture), such as persecuted witches, so difficult to identify in the archaeological literature?”

Kind of grabs your attention, right?

The author, William H. Walker, goes on to outline a methodological approach to recognizing people understood to traffic in witchcraft. But his initial observation remains as true today as it was over a decade ago: not a lot of archaeology of witches out there.

There there have been occasional discussions of witchcraft and witches as likely parts of past societies, from the ancient Mediterranean to the 19th century US. In 2008, Archaeology magazine detailed the arguments of a British archaeologist, Jacqui Wood, for evidence of spell-casting in the 17th century near Saveock Water in Cornwall.

But nothing has seen quite as spectacular a reception as the recent publicity around the “Pendle Witch Cottage”, excavated by the firm NP Archaeology in the UK. On their website,  they concisely report the circumstances and context of the find:

NP Archaeology uncovered a 17th century cottage beneath a grassy mound, near Lower Black Moss reservoir in the village of Barley, which lies adjacent to Pendle Hill. Work is being undertaken at the behest of United Utilities who are carrying out routine works on the reservoir there. During the course of the recording works, removal of a blocked doorway uncovered a mummified cat which had been walled in – this was often undertaken to ward off evil spirits or witches familiars. The room which the door lead into was sealed off.

The find set off a press frenzy. The Daily Mail headlined its story “Lucifer over Lancashire! Could this derelict cottage have been the setting for the Pendle witches’ coven?”.

To which I can give a simple one-word reply: No.

Not that there isn’t intrinsic interest to the find. Quoted by Britain’s Sky News, lead archaeologist Frank Giecco went so far as to characterize the site as a “Pompeii”, saying:

We rarely get the opportunity to work with something so well preserved. As soon as we started digging, we found the tops of doors, and knew we were onto something special.

The building is a microcosm for the rise and fall of this area, from the time of the Pendle witches to the industrial age. There are layers of local history right before your eyes.

And there’s the rub. Among the artifacts found were 19th century pottery, a stove, a bathing pan, and a bed. But the supposed witches who inspired the lurid press coverage lived a lot earlier.

Pendle, it turns out, is a well-known witch trial site in Lancashire, north of Manchester. In 1612, the Pendle Witch Trial brought sixteen women and four men to court, accused of a variety of practices. One of the accused, Elizabeth Southerns (aka Demdike) described exchanges with her familiar, named Tibb, who sometimes appeared to her in the shape of a black cat, although initially he appeared as a boy, and he also came to her in the form of a dog. Southerns, who died before coming to trial, was a woman in her 80s, and many of those accused were her family members.

Most of the press coverage slips uneasily between historical facts and sensationalism. The building, the media speculate, may have been “the mysterious Malkin’s Tower”, described in a 19th century source as the home of Southerns and her family, and as the gathering place for a group of the witches.

Unfortunately for the romantic desire to identify the buried cottage directly with Malkin’s Tower, there are other traditional candidates that probably have better claims to the title.

Malkin Tower Farm, identified as the traditional site of Elizabeth Southerns’ house, is located somewhat east of the Lower Black Moss Reservoir site. A local history buff posted an article dating to 2004 that discussed what seem to have then been the two alternative sites proposed, either Malkin Tower Farm on Blacko hill, or Sadlers Farm, Newchurch, historically called “Malkin field”. He noted that historical consensus was that the “tower” used by the witches was likely a barn or farm outbuilding, consistent with accounts from the 19th century. As the Burnley Express reported on August 1, a group of students from the local primary school, assisted by the Barrowford Archaeological Group (an avocational group based in Pendle), carried out test excavations at Malkin Tower farm, based on the traditional identification with Elizabeth Southerns’ residence, assumed to be demolished.

In fact, the only thing sustaining the press is the cat reportedly buried in the walls of a sealed off room of the cottage.

Press reports, even the BBC, repeat that the cat would have been placed to ward off evil. But Sky News suggests the cat was buried (and thus, presumably, the door to the room of the cottage was sealed off) in the 19th century– 200 years after the Pendle witch trials. The Daily Mail is more precise, saying the cat was placed ca. 1800 AD.

The main authority for the argument is Simon Entwhistle, described as an “expert” in the Pendle witch trials. Which in a way he is: he conducts tours of the Pendle Hills area, an extension of his professional practice as a guide specializing in “ghost, murder, and mystery” tours. Entwhistle is quoted by the BBC saying

Cats feature prominently in folklore about witches. Whoever consigned this cat to such a horrible fate was clearly seeking protection from evil spirits.

Really?

I find myself agreeing with Carole Elizabeth Ballard, who commented on another press report:

Wow, talk about an article dumbed down!   There is no evidence that the cat was black, and they are often found in spaces where they can first reach, then cannot get out of.  Chimneys where a favorite, the cat would go on a warm shelf and suffocate itself.   Dead cats are alleged to be placed in walls to keep spirits away and bad luck, but, I doubt very much anyone alleged to be a witch would brick one up deliberately. As a further comment, the items in the house where 19th Century – NOT 16th or 17th when the Witch Trials took place.

But the story has legs. The version Ballard objected to was published on something called PRI’s The World, subtitled “Global Perspectives for an American Audience” from the BBC, PRI, and WGBH. So we have US Public Radio promoting unfounded heavy-breathing sensationalism originating with a professional ghost tour guide.

So what can we say? NP Archaeology says the original building dates to the 17th century, and was used into the 19th. That is, by itself, pretty neat. But not, of course, something to generate all that press coverage. For that, you need witches in the neighborhood– even if there is little likelihood that they lived in this building itself.

And then there is the cat, which NP Archaeology and more sober descriptions do suggest was deliberately placed in the building wall. While I want to follow Ballard in rejecting the entire narrative, the cat deserves a little more time and respect, especially if, as I think it does, such serious consideration puts the final nail in the coffin of “the witches’ cottage”.

I tried unsuccessfully to find anything to support the idea that walling cats up in rooms is a known prevention against evil.

James Serpell, Professor of Humane Ethics and Animal Welfare at the University of Pennsylvania, provides the most reliable overview of treatment of cats in human history that I know of.  Writing in 2000, he traced suspicion of cats as associates, first of Catholic heretics (imagine attempts to derive “Cathar” from “cat”), and later of witches, to the medieval Catholic church’s campaign against other surviving folk religions, in which cats were well-regarded.

But while he chronicles a sickening array of systematic violence against cats, he does not describe walling cats up in buildings. For that, I had to compromise and accept sources with murkier authority. These sources do provide accounts of cats being buried, but in more complex locations and for more varied reasons– none of them to ward off evil, and none  associated with cats as witches’ familiars.

A 1902 compendium of folklore from Scotland compiled by the well-recognized folkorist John Gregorson Campbell says that a cat could be buried alive to invoke a favorable wind. A woman wanting to keep a sailor with her could close a cat up in a cupboard (apparently, alive) to bring on contrary winds.

The closest I can come to the reported practice is contained in a long description of the way the Catholic Church treated cats in a popular book by Barbara Holland, described by Wikipedia as a successful general author. She describes similar practices to those mentioned by the more scholarly Serpell, detailing a history of European cat burnings on the occasion of Catholic festivals, in part to counter earlier traditions in which cats were celebrated as sources of fertility. In these older practices, cats were reportedly buried in or near agricultural fields.

In what seems to be a related practice, Holland writes that

Throughout Northern Europe and the British Isles cats someone retained their benign connection with hearth and home, so that when you built a house it was wise to bury a live cat under the threshold…In the footings of walls and towers of castles and churches cats were buried alive as guardian spirits and to make sure the building would stand stoutly; even august Westminster, during later repairs, gave up its withered feline body.

Nothing says that this practice is what was responsible for the cat reportedly found in the Pendle Hill house. But it is the only grounded account I can find that even suggests a history for cats being deliberately buried in buildings.

No witches, just superstition that might be deeply rooted in folk construction practices.

I couldn’t be more happy. A while ago (a loong while ago) I started writing a blog post inspired by Killgrove’s work. For a lot of reasons, I had to leave it unpublished (you’d be surprised how many posts end that way; if I don’t have something broader to say I still have an old-fashioned print publication idea that just reposting is not really right…).

The post that originally inspired me to start my draft reproduced a paper Killgrove (and co-authors) presented at the European Association of Archaeologists. They used a combination of bioarchaeological methods to explore the lives and statuses of immigrants to ancient Rome, who are estimated to have made up at least 5%, and possibly as much as 35%, of the population of imperial Rome– as they noted, possibly one in three people on the streets of ancient Rome.

The entire study is worth reading– I particularly like the critical attitude they brought to using epigraphic data (tombstone inscriptions) as a source of information, where their paper is a textbook example of source-side critique in archaeology, fundamental to contemporary practice in the discipline.

(While most of the links for source-side critique I would like to embed are behind walls, check out Alison Wylie’s classic essay on analogy in Thinking from Things).

So, a great paper overall. But the paragraph that inspired me to think about blogging was at the end, zeroing in on the most invisible of this invisible population: immigrant women in imperial Rome.

Immigrant Roman women comprise one of the most understudied populations in the ancient world, with sparse evidence of their existence and their daily lives coming from tombstones and other written accounts.  As part of a larger project on migration to Imperial Rome, we found bioarchaeological evidence of female immigrants through isotope analysis. Contrary to assumptions that migration is age- and gender-selective, chemical analysis of skeletons showed that immigration to Rome was not the exclusive domain of men; however, the reasons for and structure of migration is much better understood for Roman males because of historical and epigraphical biases in their favor.

You can see what excited me here. I like to say that archaeologists just need to ask the right questions and we will find ways to tease information out of our already-existing evidence. I am kind of a trace methods evangelist.

(Here, it would be fair to say I could be subject to the old canard “those who can, do; those who cannot, teach”, since I came along at a time when methods like these were either unbelievably expensive specializations dominated by a few people privileged to have access to nuclear reactors or the like, or were way in our future. So maybe better to say I am a trace methods groupie… and as anyone who followed the Grateful Dead will appreciate, there is honor in recognizing genius even if you are not a genius yourself.)

Anyway, back on point: I really do believe that the democratization of trace methods that has already happened is revolutionary. It is exposing the actual variability once cloaked in our assemblages– the stuff of difference, of all kinds.

But the revolution has been slower than I would like. Yes, XRF portables are now in the hands of the people– but only the people whose institutions can raise tens of thousands of dollars. Ancient DNA analyses are still very expensive, so large numbers of samples from a population are a rarity. Big projects still tend to be dominated by big institutions, and big institutions are inherently conservative in the ways they conceptualize research. But it is arguable that it is in the borderlands of disciplines that we see truly new ideas emerging, a theme considered in relation to gender studies 2003 in the journal Gender and Society.

(This is an absolutely expected outcome of peer review, and not a criticism of people: big new ideas are by definition untested, so they are eliminated when a large number of peer reviewers are asked to weight in. In a group of 5 or 6 reviewers, someone will find an unsupported assumption. Ironically, much of the writing about would also be inaccessible to readers, but try this open access paper.)

And that brings us to what Kristina Killgrove and her colleagues have done. They have turned crowd-sourcing into a new, independent stream of funding for exciting new research. They already have achieved their modest goal of raising $6,000– and got mainstream news coverage in the process. (Don’t let that stop you from adding to the contributions! they promise to use the funds to increase our knowledge of this understudied population, and in this business, more samples not only makes for stronger generalizations, it also increase the possibility of including individuals from rarer segments of the ancient population.)

And what coverage: CNN’s story actually gets it: titled Who were the 99% of ancient Rome?, the story accurately summarizes the previous research on which Killgrove and colleagues will build:

Many people thought only young boys came to the city, but Killgrove found older men, women and children among her immigrants.

Reporting like this (albeit in a CNN blog, and not–yet– on the front page– but that will come…) is what we ideally would like to see emerging from archaeology: reports that connect our work to the lives of the majority of people today. Brava!

First, there was the headline: Researchers at SMU-led Etruscan dig in Italy discover ancient depiction of childbirth – first of its kind ever found.

Yet another  “first of its kind ever found”, I thought, sighing about the media (again).

But then I took a second look: the image published showed a close-up of a fragment of pottery, the surface blackened over a brown paste, with a stamped rectangular panel that at first was utterly illegible to me as anything more than circles and lines.

The article told me that I was seeing

the head and shoulders of a baby emerging from a mother represented with her knees raised and her face shown in profile, one arm raised, and a long ponytail running down her back.

With that prompting, I could image two circular shapes as a baby’s head and body, inverted, between the legs of a squatting woman.

That set me off on an image search for something I remembered seeing another time… a petroglyph from the Moab, Utah area, widely reproduced and described on the official BLM web site as “the well known ‘birthing scene’”.

Again, to “see” the image we are instructed to look for the infant’s body:

Notice the feet first presentation of the baby.

These two images, so distant in space and separated in time by hundreds of years, each schematized to the point that no facial features are depicted on the mother’s body, are nonetheless completely legible as representations of childbirth. They seem to naturally communicate a message to us: separated at birth, they are nonetheless fraternal twins.

Except… I wonder about histories of visualization of childbirth. What do we see, when, and where?

I traced the new Etruscan find back to a press release from Southern Methodist University. The Poggio Colla project looks like a model for the open publication of research, its website describing an explicit commitment to changing the image of archaeology “from an elite and esoteric discipline understood by only a chosen few”.

Short narratives about the excavations allow the identification of the context of the birth image as Trench PC41, where the final summary by the field supervisor says

“Our efforts were focused on the removal of a very early layer of black sediment that lay below the site’s monumental architecture. In the ancient matrices we discovered an incredible amount of bucchero, a ceramic type characteristic of the 6th and 7th centuries BCE for which the Etruscans are famous. Amongst the excavated materials were a number of particularly important finds that include scenes of childbirth, potentially the earliest known example from Classical art.”

Other evidence prompted excavators to think of the site as possibly a shrine to a female divinity:

The abundance of weaving tools and a stunning deposit of gold jewelry discovered earlier have already suggested to some scholars that the patron divinity may have been female.

Greg Warden, director of the project, went further, implying that the imagery might indicate “the kind of worship that went on at the hilltop sanctuary of Poggio Colla”. Presumably, this means rites aimed at securing safe childbirth.

The specialist in Etruscan bucchero pottery who identified the image, Phil Perkins, is quoted as saying

“Etruscan women are usually represented feasting or participating in rituals, or they are goddesses. Now we have to solve the mystery of who she is and who her child is.”

For him, the image demands identification of the mother giving birth with a goddess.

There is clearly a rich iconography of childbirth in the Classical world involving mortal women.

A website by Hollins University professor Christina Saloway about the Greek Classical world includes 4th and 5th century BC images of women, shown seated in profile, experiencing or reacting to the rigors of childbirth. The Metropolitan Museum of Art published a 4th century Hellenistic sculpture from Cyprus that shows the moment immediately after delivery of a child by a clothed, seated woman, whose position can be viewed from multiple sides:

A standing attendant, whose head is missing, supports the mother from behind. At the foot of the couch, a seated attendant holds the newborn child

These Greek and Cypriot images are dated only slightly later than the Etruscan sherd, which is given a date of ca. 600 BC.

The posture of birth in these examples, unlike the Etruscan one, presumes the woman is supported by a birthing chair. Birthing chairs are also a normal part of late Roman practice; for example, a website on Roman women maintained by professor Ann Raia at the College of New Rochelle reproduces an ivory plaque from 1st century BC Pompeii, and describes a very similar scene:

The pregnant woman sits on a birthing chair. Behind her, a standing woman holds her steady as she lifts her left arm backwards to grasp the attendant. The midwife kneels in front of the mother with a sponge in her right hand. Behind her stands a veiled woman who extends her hands toward the mother.

These Classical descriptions and images of childbirth posture are very different from anything the Etruscan image might be showing, however schematic it is.

A closer match may come from the documented birthing practices of ancient Egypt, where the recovery of a Middle Kingdom “birthing brick” reinforces texts interpreted to indicate that “the standard form of childbirth in ancient Egypt was for the woman to deliver the baby while squatting on two mud bricks”. In Egyptian art, the moment of birth itself is not shown.

So in the Etruscan context, perhaps the unusual nature of the frontal image showing the child emerging from the mother’s body supports interpretation as non-human, a divinity.

But the same assumption is harder to make in the Americas, where explicit imagery of mothers giving birth to infants is far more common. A Mixtec historical manuscript from Oaxaca, Mexico, dating after 1000 AD depicts the Lady 3 Flint, a high-ranking woman, giving birth: mother and child are nude, the baby still attached by the umbilical cord, the red blood of afterbirth pooling around the mother. Precisely the same composition is found in other Mixtec manuscript images featuring different noblewomen.

But it is not only historical women who are shown giving birth in American traditions. Slightly later in central Mexico, an Aztec stone statue shows one of the major goddesses squatting in birth, her child emerging face first.

This kind of presentation of a child face first during birth is described by Michelle Hegmon and Wenda Trevathan as “unusual in human birth” in their discussion of similar imagery on Mimbres pottery from the US Southwest dating between 1000 and 1150 AD.

Hegmon and Trevathan note that Mimbres images show the infant emerging face first, arms outstretched, a position they note is so unusual that it is not even described in obstetrical literature. While the BLM describes the dangling limbs on the Utah “birthing” scene as legs, all that is really distinguishable are extended linear body parts– as likely to be arms as legs, and thus as likely to be unnatural as the position shown by the Mimbres painters.

While Hegmon and Trevathan argue that this divergence from real birth posture is due to the Mimbres artists being men unfamiliar with actual childbirth, it is possible that the child emerging face first, arms already outstretched, ready to seize objects in the environment, reflects traditions like those of the Aztec in which some supernatural children are born already able to take up arms and defend their mothers. Less an image of natural childbirth, such details may reflect the subtleties of representation really legible only to someone who was steeped in the everyday life, historical traditions, and beliefs of the society that created them.

The Etruscan image set off a memory that led me to locate the Utah petroglyph. So similar on the surface, in their specific historical contexts these two schematic images of frontally posed women in labor are actually quite distinct, and we need to attend to the tiniest details to be able to secure our understandings at all.

So, not twins separated at birth: rather, birth separated by history and culture.

a protein called osteocalcin, which is produced by bone-forming cells called osteoblasts, binds to a specific receptor on cells of the testes. Male mice that were unable to make osteocalcin (as a result of genetic manipulation) produced less testosterone and were less fertile. When they mated, they had fewer and smaller offspring.

But it seems that even with the possibilities for slightly risque humor, the story may be too complicated for anyone other than blogs like Jezebel and others to go for the obvious punchline.

My metaphorical ears perked up when I read the brief description of the research, by Professor Gerard Karsenty of Columbia University’s Medical Center. The full article appeared in Cell in March of this year.

The original NY Times blog post was titled “Examining the Mystery of Skeleton, Sugar and Sex” and then was retitled “Examining Bone’s Role in Fertility” (although my links, regardless of title, call up a post with the original title). Karsenty’s research, as the more complex title suggests, is about how bones interact with other skeletal systems, not just specifically about sexuality.

Bone biology is, for reasons idiosyncratic and motivated, a major example I use in teaching about the flexibility of human sex. One of the first things I do in the semester is elicit from students a list of what they understand to be “markers” of sex: everything from hair style to hormones to skeletal morphology. Then we walk through the list, examining whether they can actually rely on any specific signal to do what in most naive groups they assume it does: divide human beings into two, and only two, mutually exclusive categories.

Students are generally untroubled by arguments that clearly cultural characteristics don’t work particularly well (dress, hairstyle, and the like they conceive of as performative without much urging on my part). Most of my work goes into making them understand that there is not a simple pathway from embryonic chromosomal variability to adult sexual identity. This is where the resistance comes in, and bones play an important role for many of my students: they think they know that the human skeleton comes in two completely distinct variants.

Which is great for me, because I am lucky enough to be in a department with a biological anthropologist who specializes in bone biology, Associate Professor Sabrina Agarwal. Her research looks at variability in bone biology by examining populations from different historical periods. It calls into question some things so widely accepted as facts that the NY Times states them without reservation:

It is well known that the hormones estrogen and testosterone, produced in the ovaries and testes, help to regulate bone growth. When women reach menopause, estrogen levels decrease along with bone mass, putting them at increased risk for osteoporosis. As men age, their testosterone and estrogen levels decline, as well. Men lose bone, but much more slowly than women do.

So, I am in a privileged position: I can bring into my classroom an expert who actually knows how development of the apparently solid and, for many students, determinative skeletal biology is actually dynamic and systemic. As she and Patricia Stuart Macadam wrote in a review of evolutionary biology of osteoporosis

a women’s risk of developing osteoporosis is greatly mediated by factors that are independent of the menopause-induced drop in estrogen levels, such as genetics, nutrition, and physical activity. Pregnancy and lactation can also play potentially important roles in female bone maintenance.

Agarwal’s analyses of medieval British populations are illustrative. Examining a rural population, she concluded in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology that in fact,

Significant age-related changes… were observed to occur primarily by middle age with significant differences between the youngest and two older age groups. Neither sex showed continuing change in trabecular structure between the middle and old age groups. …females showed no statistical differences among the age groups in bone connectivity. … We speculate that while nutritional factors may have initiated some bone loss in both sexes, physical activity could have conserved bone architecture in old age in both sexes, and reproductive factors such as high parity and extended periods of lactation could have played a key role in female bone maintenance in this historic population.

A more recent article, also in the AJPA, adds that in the same population

Females appear to suffer greater bone loss at an earlier age with no change in [bone mineral density] between middle and old age, whereas males show a more steady loss of [bone mineral density] across the age groups.

To rephrase the New York Times generalization to account for these results: in this medieval British rural village,

When women reached menopause, estrogen levels decreased but bone mass did not, having already suffered bone loss at younger ages. As men age, their testosterone and estrogen levels decline, as well. Men lost bone, much more steadily than women did.

Placing these results in context, Agarwal also conducted studies of city residents living at the same time. In an article in press in American Anthropologist, she adds discussion of two populations from medieval London, where she found more familiar patterns that adhere more closely to what today is treated as normal, and thus unavoidable: post-menopausal women suffered the highest levels of osteoporosis. Subsequent studies she and her grad students and postdocs have carried out demonstrate repeatedly that at different times and places, skeletal development may or may not mirror what we have come to take as natural today.

This serendipitous exposure to a body of research that I might not have become familiar with as early or as well if the author were not my colleague shapes my reception of the report on Karsenty’s research. The NY Times blog post presents it in the deterministic mode that has become the dominant way biological findings are represented today. Biology has become, in the mind of the public, fed and reinforced by media, a search for trans-historically true and relatively simple facts that together will account for all the human variability we see today, and can propose based on the material traces of past populations.

This desire for a simple model in which humans are mechanistic products of uniform forces may be comforting. It fulfills a need to be able to control the world, if not in reality (where we know that, in the famous image, a butterfly in the Amazon may cause storms far away, in systems too complex to be reduced to a few variables) then at least in theory. But it is fundamentally untrue.

I want to be clear: I don’t presume that Professor Karsenty or his colleagues are under an illusion that things are simple. Indeed, we can read his work as an attempt to make what was a simple model more appropriately complex; he is quoted as saying

“We thought that if the sex organs talk to the skeleton, then the skeleton should talk back to the sex organs”.

Asking questions like this can be a step along the path to developmental systems theory, which “replaces unhelpful genetic metaphors with a molecular understanding of gene action during the course of development” and “incorporates a concept of experience that goes beyond the traditional equation of experience with learning” so that we understand that “every pattern of behavior has multiple determinants…and the task of developmental analysis is to specify the ways in which the determinants act together in particular cases”.

That Karsenty is thinking in these more interesting ways is suggested by his characterization of the possible implications of the research:

“One idea is that bone might not just be a victim of aging,” he said. “It might also be a contributor.”

But getting readers to see the developmental implications continues to be impeded by the metaphors we resort to that reduce the body to the status of a machine. Dr. William Crowley of Harvard Medical School, while perceptively suggesting the full story of skeletal biology and fertility might be more “complicated”, falls into the trap:

Luteinizing hormone is “the on-off switch” for testosterone, said Dr. Crowley. Osteocalcin, on the other hand, looks more like a “dimmer switch” that modulates the process.

This introduces an unwarranted hierarchy into what actually is beginning to be understood as a complex system. Osteocalcin isn’t subordinate to luteinizing hormone; both act together, and the way they are taken up needs to be thought of as an interaction that takes place simultaneously, not in serial, as the on/off and dimmer switch metaphor suggests.

And in fact, the best demonstration of the failure of that simple, mechanistic metaphor is contained in the description of how osteocalcin works– a description that explains the original, complicated title of the NY Times blog post.

Why was the blog post originally about the mystery of “Skeleton, Sugar and Sex”?

Osteocalcin doesn’t just bind to receptors on male testes and influence testosterone production. Karsenty was actually originally pursuing its role in another bodily process:

osteocalcin boosts insulin production in the pancreas and also increases insulin sensitivity (making the body more responsive to the hormone). Insulin, in turn, acts to lower blood sugar.

No mechanical metaphor can cover these two diverse effects that osteocalcin has. The “dimmer switch” would need to simultaneously raise the thermostat in the house, or maybe initiate the internet connection. This is real human biology, really complicated. Not unknowable, but messy, with lots of particularities that we are only just beginning to understand.

Our understanding starts, of course, by recognizing that things formerly thought to be inert products of hierarchically more important systems are actually actively involved in a network of processes that are remarkably plastic, that give rise to emergent properties, where “biology” cannot be walled off from “experience”.

Let’s give Professor Karsenty the last word here; in a characterization that captures the essence of developmental systems approaches, he added

“The body is not an assembly of silos that don’t speak to each other, but is full of surprising examples of crosstalk.”

My post rehearsed a number of reasons to be skeptical of the widely reported story about a Roman British site being described as a brothel. Centrally, I objected to the claim that Roman women had “little or no access to effective contraception”.

After reviewing the evidence that Roman women did have effective contraception, and the evidence that Roman demography provides that family planning was actually widespread, I wrote

But there is more than one way to imagine this villa populated with women who, although living in a house of some presumed luxury, did not themselves have the means to use contraception known to and employed by others in Roman Britain.

I then reviewed the archaeological writing about the site, which showed that it was a working farm in a rural area.

I left open the possibility that Dr. Jill Eyers was right in her conclusion, although I think it was clear that I disagreed with her, and especially, that I found problematic her quoted conclusion that

“The only explanation you keep coming back to is that it’s got to be a brothel”.

Now, Dr. Eyers is back in the news with renewed claims that the site has to have been a brothel. Which leads me to provide my own answer to my rhetorical question.

No. And no again.

The blog Rogue Classicism reviews the new discussion, which originates with a BBC News item promoting a BBC television program. Not news, really, but noteworthy because of the greater balance shown by the BBC reporter, whose article starts out

New research has cast doubt on the theory that 97 infants were killed at a Roman brothel in Buckinghamshire.

Which is no surprise to me, since a year ago I found the idea dubious. But there is one person who still finds it entirely convincing: Dr. Eyers, quoted as saying

“To be honest, when I first put this idea forward last year, it was really to get people talking and debating, but the more I look into this, the more convinced I am by my original brothel theory.”

The article says her continued studies of “the landscape around the villa site” have produced “a whole host of other evidence” supporting her suggestion, although the only data cited was plotting the locations of the burials and drawing the conclusion that all the infants were buried in a 50 year period, from 150-200 AD.

So, where does the “new research” come from to “cast doubt” on this still unconvincing speculation?

The BBC News article cites two lines of argument.

The biological studies of the infants recovered have now extended to include ancient DNA analysis by Keri Brown of the University of Manchester. This study found a normal sex ratio (about half boys and half girls). The BBC News article says this is unexpected in a brothel site, citing a bath-house in Ashkelon interpreted as a likely brothel, where the infants killed were boys.

Presumably, although they don’t go into the logic, the idea is girls can be raised to be sex workers, while boys would just be extra mouths to feed.

Curiously, though, they don’t drop the idea of infanticide, even though they note that infanticide sites usually do show selective sex bias, with girls more likely to be eliminated than boys. The logical conclusion would be that the deaths here don’t actually represent infanticide at all, since they mirror a normal birth ratio.

(Parenthetical note: I myself cannot support the assertion that infanticide normally affects girls more than boys historically. It seems to be true in the modern world. Any comments that can point me and readers to sources from antiquity accepted gratefully.)

The BBC News article doesn’t draw what I see as a logical connection between this sex ratio evidence and the other skeptical argument it cites, by the keeper of archaeology at the Buckinghamshire County Museum, Brett Thorn. He proposes an alternative interpretation that

“the site was a shrine and women went there to give birth, and get protection from the mother goddess during this dangerous time. The large number of babies who are buried there could be natural stillbirths, or children who died in labour.”

This independent suggestion is more consistent with the reported sex ratio. Thorn has curated a museum exhibit of objects from the site to support his argument, noting that

“There are a few significant religious objects from the site that indicate possible connections with a mother goddess cult.”

Despite the fact that this is clearly a case of sensationalizing a somewhat routine site for the sake of ratings, it seems like the development may be showing us the self-correcting nature of archaeology in action.

The original claims still are unconvincing. The objections I raised a year ago are not addressed, at least in the BBC News report, and new data are not consistent with expectations, while alternative models are being proposed that would better account for the known data.

So, “are dead babies good evidence for a Roman brothel?”

No.

Recently, I wrote about the coincidence of two studies published in July: one demonstrating genetic overlap between modern humans and Neanderthals (resulting from sexual relationships), the other proposing that Neanderthals were pushed out of their territory by an invasion of modern humans ten times the size of Neanderthal populations. Together, these seem to me to suggest a historical situation of tragedy.

I am not the only anthropologist noticing the media fascination with Neanderthal-human relations: Jason Antrosio, at Living Anthropologically, has two long and thoughtful posts, one about how burgeoning new research results are being absorbed into the existing picture without considering how we think about species and hybridity, another about how Neanderthal and modern human genetic overlaps have been represented in textbooks.

As Antrosio notes, before the recent surge in evidence showing significant genetic evidence of Neanderthal-modern human sexual relations, anthropologists were tempted to project interpretations of Neanderthal features far removed from sex as evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans would not have been attracted to each other. He quotes a 2007 publication saying

In particular, the very broad and short waist would have imparted a “stiffness” to Neanderthal movement that would have made them cut a very distinctive figure on the landscape. The consequent distinctive behavioral signal further reduces the probability that the two kinds of hominid would have shared any elements of a specific mate recognition system, and that any biologically significant level of gene exchange ever occurred between them.

Now, this scholarly paragraph led me to realize something that has been simmering under the surface in all the reading I have been doing. I have commented before on the media representation of presumed sexual conduct inferred for Neanderthals.

The coverage of studies that show some overlap between modern humans and the reconstructed Neanderthal genome consistently betrays a fascination with what the media sees as the unlikely, but now certain, sexual relationships these findings imply.

The media– and, as the quote reproduced above from Living Anthropologically shows, at least some academics– have a hard time imagining that ancestral modern humans would have found Neanderthals attractive. At the same time, they flirt with fantasies about hyper-sexy Neanderthals.

There is a fantasy of cross-species rape lurking here that is not far from Jean Auel’s story of Ayla, described as “blonde, blue-eyed, straight-legged, and vocal–considered bizarre and unattractive by her adoptive Clan”. Ayla is driven out by the Neanderthal Broud, “the brutal and proud youth who is destined to become their next leader sees her differences as a threat to his authority.” Ayla herself, of course, finds true love with others like her: “tall, handsome Jondalar, who brings her a language to speak and an awakening of love and desire”.

Love and desire.

Which, the popular books tell us, cannot exist across species lines, not between the Neanderthals and the modern humans who call them “Flatheads”.

Until we stop imagining Neanderthals as brutish louts with receding skulls and bow legs, incapable of communicating, and early modern humans as tall, blond, blue-eyed, and uniquely gifted in art and speech, we will never move the media narratives away from this imagery. The question is, can we change our own hidden assumptions enough to keep from reinforcing this species-serving dichotomy?